Where the Demand for a Reason for Everything Leads
Leibniz held that we can find no true or existent fact without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise. Spinoza put the demand more starkly: for each thing there must be assigned a cause or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence. It sounds like housekeeping — explanations exist for things — and it is not modest in its consequences. Spinoza's commitment to universal intelligibility led him to conclude that reality is a single infinite substance that he called God or nature. Point the same appetite at consciousness and the demand can lead into panpsychism: a view Aeon calls increasingly popular, and one that rejects the division into conscious and non-conscious things.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Spinoza's conclusion is the tell. A demand for explanations that ends with reality as one infinite substance called God or nature has stopped describing the world and started legislating for it. Once 'there must be a reason' is treated as a rule about what can exist, you get metaphysics whether you asked for any or not.
That is what makes it worth following. The division into conscious and non-conscious things is load-bearing: desks, chairs and rocks sit on one side without moral status, humans, bonobos and dogs on the other with at least some moral recognition. Panpsychism rejects the division, so the tidy moral line drawn from it can't simply stay where it is. That is a bigger claim than a quarrel about explanations, which is precisely the appeal.